and Baby Makes Three
by Neftzer
Summary: COMPLETE Whatever happened to Little John's original 'dead men' gang? Now you see 'em in 1x02 "Sheriff Got Your Tongue?", now you don't by 1x03 "Who Shot the Sheriff?" Short Fic submission for LJ's INTERCOMM 2011.


*_The following was entered in the 2011 LiveJournal RH INTERCOMM (a BBC Robin Hood inter-community/inter-journal fanfiction celebration). It's still formatted for such. You may find the complete competition (voting is now ongoing) by doing a search at Live Journal for 'RH INTERCOMM'._

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**Title:**...and Baby Makes Three  
**Author:** LiveJournal ID Nettlestone Nell  
**Word Count:** 1818  
**Rating:** G  
**Characters/Pairings:** Little John, Alice Little, Forrest, Hanton, Roy, Allan, Robin, Will, Much, Eve, OC "Tess"; Little John/Alice Little  
**Spoilers/Warnings:** Falls between 1x02 "Sheriff Got Your Tongue?" and 1x03 "Who Shot the Sheriff?"  
**Summary:** Three of Sherwood's 'original' dead men: one is killed, one comes back to life, one decides to stay dead.  
**Disclaimer:** No one can truly own the legend of Robin Hood, but BBC/Tiger Aspect seem to hold rights to this particular iteration.  
**Category:** Drama, Angst; Short Fic

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**...and Baby Makes Three**

No one had expected them to need to appoint a spot for a Sherwood cemetery so soon. An outlaw burial ground, set aside for interning men already long ago declared 'dead'.

But then, no one had expected Hanton to die. Shoot his mouth off? Act like a bloody idiot and complain about following orders? _Yes_. But to die?

It was Allan who had first learnt the truth from castle staff. That the reward placed on Robin had been too much a carrot for the donkey that Hanton tended toward being to resist. He had slunk into Nottingham when no one in Sherwood would notice, and attempted to sell-out the newly reconfigured gang's new leader to the Sheriff. His first payment for information was to be a meal of such a sumptuous nature a fat bishop would have himself slavered at the sight of it.

But (for whatever unknown reason of his own) the Sheriff had not taken Hanton's betrayal as true. Recognizing Hanton as a convicted man, escaped-to-Sherwood, the meal had been poisoned, the toxin of choice a slow-acting one. The blackguard had been able to make his way back into the heart of the forest and repent his sin among those against whom he had attempted to trespass.

John sighed. Perhaps it was his fault, a flaw in his prior leadership. He should have done a better job of warning Robin that Hanton had ever been skimming the intersection of faithfulness and disloyalty where his forest brethren were concerned. That he had a tendency to steal from among his own fellows. That, perhaps, the crime for which he had been condemned to hard labor at the Treeton Mines (a sentence he had fled to Sherwood in the face of) had possibly been justly adjudicated.

_Too late, now_. There was nothing left to be done but hear the others try to scrape together well-meant words and positive sentiments now that he was dead, and at the burying point.

Forrest turned and looked at his former leader, his mentor, straight in the eyes. "I am going, John," he said. "Not like Hanton, to betray you all and then meet my Maker. I am going...because Ann must have the use of me now, and I must..."

"What has changed?" John asked, suspiciously, his words, in their rarity, bringing the conversations of all outlaws gathered at the grave to a standstill.

Forrest looked a bit guilty. "I have seen Ann."

"Yes, we know, we were all there with you, weren't we?" Roy asked in his customary rhetorical fashion. "Helped collect the coin and food for the basket, didn't we?"

"Yes, but after that, I went back and...We have reconciled."

Robin took two steps closer to join the discussion. "But is it safe for her to know where you are?" "She is with child," John surmised, aloud, having suspected such a reconciliation some weeks ago from the new spring infused in Forrest's every step.

"Well, that's no good, now is it?" Allan cut in. "I mean, babies and all that, _congratulations and huzzah_, but how's a forest-bound outlaw to protect a child on the teat? Or its mother?"

John raised his hand for silence. "Ann cannot be left on her own," he declared, with an unexpected force of emotion. "And she must not be without Forrest."

"Yes," agreed Robin, nodding his head, intuitively knowing what the former leader of this gang wished. "We will take the rest of our coin and see to it they are sent safely away from here, beyond the reach of the Sheriff."

"That won't be a small amount of coin," Will warned.

"Nor a small distance to travel," Much added.

"Well," Roy chimed in, "we are meant to protect the weak and the helpless, yes? So, as Forrest was weak, and his Ann helpless in that moment to resist his charms..." the tall blonde guffawed at his entendre noisily enough to make up for the decided lack of cheeky laughter among the others.

Little John had looked to Robin for devising a plan. It had not taken long. "Shave your face within an inch of your life," he had directed the father-to-be. "Allan will get us some women's clothing. You'll leave the shire as your wife's auntie."

Forrest had gripped John's arm tightly before settling onto the cart that would carry his wife and him up the North Road, away from a life of outlawry, away from Robin Hood, to a place neither of them were known.

John had thought of how Forrest had been little more than a boy (only barely a young man) when he had first come to Sherwood; frightened, amazed that he had miraculously escaped punishment. Crying every night for the young bride he had abandoned. His crime? Poaching rabbits among the warrens in Sherwood, meat meant to feed himself and his Ann. Fur to help in the lining of a coat.

The number of pelts found by the Sheriff's men had taken his punishment from simple maiming to a hanging offense.

There were many things he would have liked to say to Forrest before he left, things he would have liked to be able to eloquently share about life, about marriage, and hopes for the future. But, as usual, they all stayed within him, added to the numberless other unspoken thoughts, his steady, reliable gaze all he had been able, in the end, to offer.

Later in the day he and Roy were out gathering wood and checking snares, just the two of them, when Roy brought up the subject of Alice, only recently discovered re-located in Locksley.

"Why don't you do the same, John?" he had asked. "Won't be long before we'll have set aside another nest egg or two, get you and Little Little John and your wife out of the shire, settled somewhere with a chance at a real life. Roof over your head." He stooped for a moment to a tripped snare, re-set it, and then stood. "You think I don't see it, but I do. You pine for her, and the boy. This new flock of outlaws, Robin and his lads. They unsettle you. They are not contended with the world as it is. And now, no longer are you."

"No!" he had responded gruffly, viscerally.

"Is it because of your size?" Roy had asked, always saying too much when saying little would have been plenty. "I'm sure there's someway 'round that. Some hocus-pocus solution Lord Lavender Boy will have come to him in a vision," he cracked a smile, find humor in his own joke.

He had regained his usual composure and restraint. "No, I will not do the same."

"Why, then?"

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The day had been late. He had gotten free from the castle, the guards, and his shackles. It had been a mighty feat of strength. No doubt it would multiply in its telling. He would be described as half-again as tall, ferocious as a wild boar, teeth that could rend forged iron in two.

He could not think where to go, what to do with his hard-won, fragile state of freedom.

Stupidly, once he had lost the soldiers he had made a path toward Bonchurch, knowing Alice's best friend and confidante lived there.

He spied Tess' daughter Eve out at the well that served the small knot of houses (not quite a village) nearby the Lodge. She had two buckets to fill, a yoke on which to hang and carry them.

He stuck to the trees, which came up to the back of the hovel. Tess was inside, and as he suspected, Alice had left Nottingham Town (where they had been living), and was there, too.

Something inside him, he would never be able to say what, held him in his spot of concealment, did not allow him to rush in and show himself to his wife, declare to her that he lived. Instead, he waited, and listened.

"What hear you, at the Lodge?" Alice asked her friend of the servants' gossip.

"The Sheriff is saying John was hanged today..."

Alice gasped, though she had been expecting, dreading this very news.

"...along with three others: a thief, a dissident, and a fuller who ruined the Sheriff's best Court robes." "But all were hooded. Not even the executioner could vouch for their identities."

"What does it matter?" Alice asked, clearly exhausted from the day, the past weeks of his imprisonment and sentencing. "Only more scandal, more fingers pointed."

"Some say, you know," Tess spoke slowly and mysteriously, "that not all men dead at the hands of the Sheriff end up in the ground. Some, it is said, live on as 'dead men' in the King's Forest, eating of the King's venison, their bellies far fuller than ours."

"Oh, please," Alice had begged, crying out, "don't say such things to me!"

From where he was, John recoiled, as though she had slapped his face.

"_I_ cannot live on dreams, on fairy stories now!"

"No, my dear," Tess commiserated, "you cannot, I suppose." She considered for a moment. "Do you believe the soldiers will continue to trouble you?"

"No. Once they took," her voice faltered on the name, "John I have not seen hide nor hair of the Sheriff's men."

"Well, there is that to be thankful for, then."

"It is a cold comfort, Tess," Alice had said, leaning into her friend's consoling embrace.

Feeling like a sleepwalker, he had stepped deeper into the trees, eventually finding his way to the depths of Sherwood.

He had believed, from that day forward, Alice was happier with him dead, gone forever. No more soldiers at her door, no more life of 'not-knowing'. Death. Final. An opportunity to move on. This, at least (at the very least), he could give to her.

He had not stayed long enough to learn that the next words out of Alice's mouth had been ones of fear for a child she had only just realized would be coming. A child whose father was outlawed, who was hanged. A child whose mother faced an insecure future of supporting it. A future which seemed to be filled entirely with nothing but past memories, disappointed hopes, and uncertainty.

"Why, then?" Roy had asked.

His reply was rueful, tasting of bitterness. Bitterness of the truth, not of the constancy of his feelings for her. John looked to Roy, shifting the firewood he carried in his arms in order to accommodate turning back. "Because I know her too well to think that she would go with me." He reasoned, believing his words to be true, "It is best, that _they_ stay where they are, in Locksley, and John Little stay a dead man in Sherwood. In that, I can do them the most good."

"Right," said Roy, easily convinced (as was his way), always dependable to blithely accept anything John said, and they spoke on the subject no longer.

**.+.+.**


End file.
